You Ever Get Assigned Something As A Project In School And For The Rest Of Your Life You Have A Strange

started watching white collar because the venn diagram of the white collar and leverage fandoms appears to be a circle and you know what. yeah. i get it now.

I can't stop thinking about this rabbit hole I went down a few weeks ago when I was procrastinating on my Iliad paper.

So basically. In the Lattimore translation of the Iliad (the one we read in class), he has Helen call herself a slut.

"That man is Atreus’ son Agamemnon, widely powerful,  at the same time a good king and a strong spearfighter,  once my kinsman, slut that I am. Did this ever happen?” (Lattimore 3.178-180)

Naturally I'm like yikes. Then I started wondering whether this was actually what it said in the Greek, and whether other translators disagreed.

(This is not a new thing to wonder about; people talked about this quite a bit after Emily Wilson discussed it.)

To summarize: the Greek word used here is kunops, which literally translates to dog-face or dog-eyed. This word is used precisely two other times in the Iliad: once in book one when Achilles is insulting Agamemnon and once in book eighteen when Hephaestus is talking about how his mother (Hera) threw him out. Surprise surprise, the male translators usually don't use the same word in those two places.

I could have stopped here, but naturally at this point I was like, obviously the best possible use of my time would be to go down into the depths of the library and see what word is used in these three places in every single translation of the Iliad that we have.

Too much time later, I ended up with this:

I think this table kind of speaks for itself.

Just. The way that the male translators all decide that when a woman is called "dog-face," that must mean that she's a shameless bitch, but when a man is called "dog-face," he can just be a dog-face. The bias is REALLY showing through here. I can understand shameless, but where are they getting slut bitch whore?

Lattimore is supposed to be the most literal translation! But then he just has to go and call Helen a slut for no apparent reason! Why would he do this where did it come from I want to scream. why do they assume that a woman criticizing herself has to be about sexual condemnation??

Some things that are worth noting!

As I mentioned, people have talked about this a lot in regards to Emily Wilson's translation! She gave a couple great interviews about her translation of this word (here and here). What many people forget is that she wasn't actually the first woman to translate the Iliad into English, nor was she the first person to translate the word as "dog-face." That was Caroline Alexander, eight years earlier. I love Wilson as much as the next person but let's not forget Alexander.

Yes dog-face is an insult! And yes it arguably is associated with shamelessness! There's a lot to unpack about why Helen was talking about herself this way. But it's really hard to analyze that when the bias of the male translators is bleeding through so much. I appreciate the decision to translate it literally and let readers decide for ourselves what she meant.

Your WHAT that Gilgamesh touched to please his heart, Enkidu?

I love Eliot’s hair so much, because it’s so unpractical for his line of work. A buzz cut would be so much better, no hair in your face, nothing for an opponent to grab onto. I strongly believe that Moreau had rules around hair, much like the military and that it was one of the first choices Eliot made after breaking free. That it means a lot to him. Like the first time his hair has grown too long after he leaves, he goes to cut it again and he’s standing in front of the mirror and he suddenly realizes he doesn’t want to, then that he doesn’t have to. Maybe standing in front of that mirror happens earlier and makes him realize he doesn’t want to do any of this anymore.

Since birth you could see a counter above people’s heads. It doesn’t count down to their death. It goes up and down randomly. You’re desperate to find out what it means.

I like to think that the Vargas v Live Herbally case is famous in the legal world and that Harry would be in awe to find out that Hardison was "Joseph Miller" this whole time

*Poll options based on less common relationship tags that co-occur with the Leverage fandom tag on Ao3. Just for fun, please no yelling over preferences Haha!

so I know I'm not the only one who saw the United Healthcare news and immediately thought of Leverage

but my thought process was, if Leverage was involved, they wouldn't have been the ones to kill the CEO. not their style. so I'm imagining Leverage in the middle of this whole con to destroy the CEO when out of the blue someone else comes in and just murders him.

hardison: so i did all that *insert technobabble hacking nonsense* for nothing??

eliot: no offense to the shooter, but if we wanted him dead, i could have killed him so much cleaner and made it look like an accident. amateur move.

The Weekend in Paris Job (S03E01) LEVERAGE: REDEMPTION (2021—)